South Korean writer Han Kang in Seoul, South Korea, in 2016. Kang has received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Lee Jin-man/AP
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Lee Jin-man/AP
South Korean writer Han Kang has received the Nobel Prize in Literature. She is the primary Korean author and the eighteenth girl to win the award. In 2016, she received the Worldwide Booker Prize for her novel The Vegetarian. She was the primary Korean author to win that award as nicely.
The brand new laureate is the 121st winner of what’s extensively seen as essentially the most prestigious award in world literature. Based by Swedish inventor and industrialist Alfred Nobel, the award is meant for an writer who has “produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.” Nobel prizes have been awarded since 1901.
The author, who’s 53 years previous, has established a readership far past her house nation, wrote critic Leland Cheuk in a current NPR evaluate of her novel Greek Classes.
“Kang has carved out an international reputation for doing unsettling, transgressive work that’s as unpredictable as it is confrontational,” he wrote. However this novel, a couple of girl who’s misplaced the flexibility to talk, and indicators as much as examine historical Greek with an teacher slowly shedding his sight, accommodates “a hopeful, and humane belief in the redemptive power of love.”
“The reading experience is like that of watching a quiet indie film that tugs little by little at your heartstrings until you’re rendered speechless with both sadness and hope by the final pages,” he wrote.
In its quotation, the Swedish Academy recommended Han Kang “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”
“In her oeuvre,” the Academy wrote, “Han Kang confronts historical traumas and invisible sets of rules and, in each of her works, exposes the fragility of human life. She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead, and in her poetic and experimental style has become an innovator in contemporary prose.”
In a 2016 NPR interview, Kang spoke to the depth and darkness in lots of her
books. “I always feel I am questioning when I write novels, and I wanted to deal with my long-lasting question about human violence and the possibility or impossibility of refusing it,” she mentioned. “And I will be happy if the readers could share my questions.”
Han Kang joins the ranks of Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez and Bob Dylan (a controversial choose who received in 2016.)
For the previous few a long time, the Nobel literature class has been dominated by white authors. Between 2000 and 2023, solely seven folks of shade have received. That’s a major change from the Nobel literature awards of the Nineteen Eighties and early Nineteen Nineties, when authors of shade from Egypt, Nigeria, Mexico, Japan, Saint Lucia and the U.S. all received inside the identical decade.
Chinese language author Can Xue was predicted by bookies to have the most effective odds of successful this 12 months, with the British betting firm Ladbrokes giving her 6/1 odds as of Wednesday afternoon, because of the prominence of such books as The Final Lover. Her novel Love within the New Millennium and story assortment I Reside within the Slums have been each longlisted for the Worldwide Booker Prize. (Ladbrokes gave the next-best odds to Australian novelist Gerald Murnane, Japanese author Haruki Murakami, Greek author Ersi Sotiropoulos and Argentinian author César Aira.)
